Whistling Straits

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Whistling Straits is one of two golf course complexes associated with The American Club, a golf resort near Kohler, Wisconsin owned by a subsidiary of the Kohler Company, a manufacturer best known for its bathroom products. The Whistling Straits complex is actually located in the unincorporated Sheboygan County community of Haven, north of the city of Sheboygan, but has a Kohler postal address because of its affiliation with The American Club.

The two courses at Whistling Straits were designed by Pete and Alice Dye. Its flagship course, the Straits Course, has a length of 7,514 yards and a par of 72. It hosted the 86th PGA Championship in August 2004, and will host the U.S. Senior Open in 2007. In January 2005, the Straits Course was announced as the site for the PGA Championships in 2010 and 2015, as well as the 2020 Ryder Cup.

The Straits Course replicates the ancient seaside links courses of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Nestled along a two-mile stretch of Lake Michigan, the course features vast rolling greens, deep pot bunkers, grass-topped dunes and winds that sweep in off the lake. At 7,514 yards, it is the second longest course to host a major.^{[citation needed]}

The seventeenth named “Pinched Nerve”, the unofficial signature hole, is the most difficult par-3 on the course. At 223 yards, with towering sand dunes and the lake to the left leaves golfers with no option but to go straight for the green.

The course also features two miles of shoreline on Lake Michigan, eight holes hugging the lake, a flock of Scottish Blackface sheep, elevation changes of approximately 80 feet and three stone bridges at holes 9, 10 and 18.

Although the Straits Course duplicates British and Irish links layouts, its original state was not linksland. Before the course was built, the property was a more or less featureless abandoned airfield called Camp Haven (1949-1959) [1], with a stream running through the middle. Its one saving grace, from a golf standpoint, was its two miles (3.2 km) of lake frontage. Kohler Company CEO Herbert Kohler signed up Dye as course architect, giving him a basically unlimited budget. During construction, the original landscape of the Straits Course alone was covered with about 800,000 cubic yards (610,000 m³) of dirt and sand. Until recently, the amount of earth moved would have been considered extreme for a golf course, but this amount has been dwarfed by that required by several other courses, most notably Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, where 25 million cubic yards (19.1 million m³) of earth were moved.

The second course at Whistling Straits, the Irish Course, is an inland grass-and-dune layout.